Exploring Equality and Human Rights in Jordan with Podcasts

Sowt’s intervention will be a multifaceted project that promotes press freedom and encourages public dialogue. Through the avenue of quality journalism, this project will focus on gender equality issues, socioeconomic rights, and freedom of expression. In this project we expect an average of 1,000 downloads per episode, or over 70,000 listens. In social media, we regularly engage 350,000 people per week. We expect these metrics to increase over the length of this project. We will use listens per episode as a main indicator to measure our reach. Content Production Sowt will produce the podcast Eib, a narrative-driven podcast that explores gender-related topics rarely discussed in the public sphere. The show’s previous success — the number one podcast in the Middle East on iTunes — attests to both the need for this type of boundary pushing coverage and a dialogue on gender equality in Jordan. This show serves to diversify voices present in the Jordanian media landscape, but also foments a meaningful public dialogue about issues pertaining to gender equality. Sowt will produce two 10-episode seasons of Eib, a total of 20 episodes. The two 10-episode seasons of Mal 3mal will be a narrative-driven dive into Jordan’s labor laws, labor conditions, and wider socioeconomic issues around the country. This show will foster a conversation around the intersection of the working-class experience in Jordan with Jordanian labor laws, highlighting instances where the law, or a lack of application of the law leaves workers in Jordan exploited on issues such as the gender pay gap and minimum wage. The final show, Harrer, is a new show Sowt will launch. This show will revolve around journalists and writers themselves to promote the public’s ability to relate to journalists. It will dive into how journalists cover stories, giving listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the stories they read about, or ones they do not usually read about, in an attempt to increase the trust in journalism. This show will serve to highlight the work of journalists around the country, but also to give listeners an understanding of how journalists work, the difficulties of reporting in Jordan and their goals. For this project, we will be conducting an outreach survey in order to better understand the nuances of our audience, as well as their demographics. This will help us strengthen our work and produce content that matches our audience's needs more closely. Training To further develop the capacity of audio journalism in Jordan, this project’s second component will be three trainings for eight to ten participants. Sowt will hold trainings during each year of the project. They will cover all aspects of audio journalism production, including technical and editorial skills. Sowt will actively encourage participation of individuals from across Jordan, going beyond the capital, Amman. Following each training, Sowt will work with the participants, who are able to contribute to the project to produce at least 5 episodes per training. Community Engagement Finally, Sowt will open up its space to community members, every two months, a total of 18 times over the lifetime of this project. They will listen to the episodes together, discuss ideas from the shows, as well as invite the hosts, the guests, and producers to learn from each other and build community. Additionally, we will host a live awards ceremony to recognize outstanding podcasts, including performances of lives podcasts. The ceremony will be hosted by Sowt at a local venue. Preceding the ceremony participants and the regional community will be asked to vote for podcasts under different categories and the winners will be announced that night